One last real wedding to sneak into the Handmade Wedding Series!

We were married last September in Virginia but procrastinated almost everything until maybe a month beforehand. Together we were working about 10,000 hours a week at Etsy and I was wearily navigating my way through the first trimester of pregnancy.

Inwardly, I was positive that if I ignored planning my wedding hard enough, a wedding fairy godmother would swoop down in a magical monsoon of glitter shimmer tulle and take care of everything for us somehow.

That actually did not happen. But, I am here to tell you that it is okay to have a wedding by the total seat of your pants. A really great wedding, even.  

This is my husband, Peter. He also works for Etsy.

Like any little girl, I had always vaguely daydreamed of what my my wedding dress would someday look like. I did not daydream myself five and 1/2 months pregnant, however. We had gotten engaged in January and then just became a little too impatient. So, I designed and made my own super beautiful knocked-up wedding dress with a ton of help from Beni of Burdastyle. When I say "help" I actually mean that she sewed the entire dress for me while I whined about how difficult it all was. I have a phobia of sewing patterns and hadn't even attempted to make anything from one since Girl Scouts in 1986. It was a totally harrowing and last-minute experience and I actually used a stapler to hem it and handsewed the snaps in our hotel room the morning before the ceremony, but it cost me $80 and I still sort of resembled the ballerina princess fairy I knew I  was inside.

Burdastyle is this clever website where you can download and print patterns and get sewing help and all kinds of other essential things for making your own fashion. Had Alchemy been around on Etsy last year I probably would have gone down that road and saved poor Beni from having to deal with me, though. A dress that hides, yet accentuates, a baby bump is definitely a custom request.  

We got married in the Japanese Garden of Maymont Park in Richmond, Virginia. Next to a waterfall. How ridiculous is that? The best part was I had never seen the place in my life and chose it on blind faith when the date was nearing and we had no location in mind. The week before the wedding I kept saying, Don't we need to get some flowers or something to, you know, decorate it?

And then when I finally saw it,  it was like, Oh, duh, it's an insanely beautiful unicorniverse paradise already! Because it was outside next to a waterfall. Lesson learned: you can avoid the hassle of choosing flowers and stuff if you just hold the whole thing outdoors where it's lovely.

If you are trying to plan a wedding from five states away and not do anything except occasionally glance at the calendar and panic, then you'll definitely need a friend to coordinate it all for you. We had Almitra, who coordinates things for a living and was able to swiftly handle all of our crises. She found us a cake (made by a really sweet lady in central Virginia) and a caterer (an old friend of hers who owns a restaurant in Richmond) and a couple cases of champagne, all amidst me crying on the telephone about how tiredly pregnant I was and sending her IMs like PLS HELP EVERYTHING IS A SHAMBLES I AM CRYING.

Neither Pete nor I have a family minister or church and we were at a loss for an officiant who could legally marry us. Eventually we gave up on the legal part and convinced our friend Brooks to do the honors as he was "our most stately friend" and we thought he could convincingly lead the ceremony. 

We actually got legally married a month and a half later at the City Clerk Office here in Brooklyn. Friends, if you're crunched for time, take my advice and just fake it. 

Pete wrote our vows the night before the rehearsal and I bobby-pinned them into a vintage copy of Treasure Island. We googled wedding vows and then added a really long Rilke quote to pad it. The ceremony still only was about two minutes long because we were all very nervous and spoke too fast. 

But the best part of our wedding was the reception. 

We held a reception at our friend's, well, cement lot in Southside Richmond. It's called The Bike Lot, and a bunch of folks we know rent garage space to work on bikes or mopeds or whatever else out there, they have a bunch of homemade ramps and the whole space is covered in beautiful graffiti. So we basically invited everyone we knew to come and have a big sweaty drunken dance party barbeque with us.

Everyone had a really great time. Pictured above on the left are Pete's sister and brother, in the latter stage of drunkeness. 

My best friend Luke had pulled a wedding band together for me and managed a few superb covers of songs by Jawbreaker and the Misfits, among others. We had two other friends play records and our first dance was to Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now by Starship.

Etsy customer support expert Lori Weaver joined in with vocals at one point. I think this was a Gorilla Biscuits song. 

And for days afterwards, Pete's motto was "If you can't skate at your own wedding, when can you skate?" 

Here is the top of our melted cake. The cake toppers were a gift from Pete's mom and dad. They had accidentally dropped and broken the foot off the bride figurine at an antique shop, and had been forced by the shop owner to buy them. Pete's mom glued the foot back on and mailed them to us as a gag, but I sort of loved their weird Precious Momentsesque charm. 

Our friends had decorated the Bike Lot with a zillion paper airplanes and not much else, which was totally sweet and beautiful. Someone had found a tandem bicycle and tied cans and such to the back, and at the end of the day we rode off together while everyone flung glitter and the contents of their cups at us. And we lived happily ever after. The end!

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